HyperFard
Prix AMMA 2025
Lou Reina,
Exhibition from June 4 to 19, 2025
Born in Paris in 2000, of a Spanish father and a French mother, Lou Reina lives and works in Paris. Graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2024 from the Tatiana Trouvé workshop, she went through a 6-month university exchange at the IUAV di Venezia University (2022). She took part in several group exhibitions including CRUSH (2023) and Autobillets (2024) at the Palais des Beaux-arts de Paris. Winner of the Paris 1 Sorbonne Jury Prize for Contemporary Art 2025, it is in this context that her personal exhibition at the Sorbonne ArtGallery takes place. His artistic practice explores the intersection between drawing and ceramics in identity-driven, dreamlike narratives that are constantly renewed.
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Photo : Ix Dartayre
This series of masks, initiated almost two years ago, accompanies the artist on a daily basis and evolves over the references, images and technical explorations that pass through it. He draws himself as a multifaceted character embodied by the masks as if each one carried within him a story, even the possibility of a performance. For the exhibition Hyperfard at the Sorbonne ArtGallery, each showcase becomes a miniature theatre, surrounded by a ceramic mask with exaggerated and ambiguous features, which seem to float in space as if suspended between two states. The intersection of the stage space and that of the exhibition is the starting point of this proposal. These sculptural presences, deployed in monumental dimensions, impose themselves as frozen figures waiting for a role. The installation plays with the border between the sculptural object and the decor, between the theatrical device and the museum display.
Masks as tools of transformation and self-determination allow the wearer to transcend individuality and inhabit a hybrid, theatrical character. Both inspired by burlesque, exacerbated codes of drag with its ability to play with identities, and to mix genres but also of older theatre; these masks navigate between different temporalities and perhaps give the sensation of an ambiguous presence captured by enamel.
These faces are surfaces for the projection of multiple narratives through which the power of makeup is replayed—make up, conceal, perform. The title Hyperfard condenses the essence of this research: make-up as an excess, as a political and aesthetic surface, as a gesture of radical transformation. It evokes a makeup pushed to the extreme, beyond camouflage, up to the manifesto. The 'hyper-' is not only amplified: it suggests an assumed overload, a fiction more true than reality.
For Lou Reina, ceramics and drawing are interwoven in a poetic narration where anachronism becomes matter and narrative. The memory of everyday objects, the traces they leave in our unconscious imaginations are the starting point for an individual or even fictional narrative that gradually becomes collective. The sculptures evoke forms known to all, yet unusable. These are still lifes, assembling objects where nothing is left to chance as if each detail retained the imprint of an instant, of an unknown will. On all the sculptures, a spectral figure hangs, between fallen star of the roaring twenties and fictitious double without ever being explicitly represented.
It is created as a language of rebus, a formal vocabulary, stemming from the symbolic and baroque field, mobilized both in still lifes and in drawings. Intimate objects seem frozen under vitrified layers of enamel, clothes encrusted with charms and accumulations of lost fragments - game pieces, keys, escarpin or bucket -, evoke the testimonies of a life of bringue at the cabaret.
Temporality is blurred; the very materiality of heavy and static ceramics invites us to question its meaning and origin, as if it came from a parallel world or from a distant time. These ceramics carry within them the trace of a sometimes accidental process. The break crosses the work, exposing its fragile nature and making resonate a founding gesture, that of drawing, which, from paper to ground, moves from sketch to tattoo of matter.